I share this email from good friend andLJ/SLJ/The Horn Book publisher Ian Singer who forwarded a passionate plea to several of us yesterday:

My friends – Good morning.

I’m writing on behalf of a single voice, who has reached out to School Library Journal looking for help and hope. And so, I am reaching out to you individually and collectively because the time for us to act is now.

While at AASL, I spoke with very many of you about this exact issue and the pressing need for us to get together and more actively to support the plight of our school libraries and librarians . . . the time for us to act is now.

So let’s start somewhere, together, and help our friend, Seanean – please see her message to SLJ below. While it would be ideal to coordinate action, we can all start by doing something on our own, via our own channels, to advocate. I’m asking you to think about what you can do and to act . . . now. On our end, we’re going to do all we can via our social media channels, our newsletters (LJ/SLJ and The Horn Book), our blogs. Our efforts can’t focus solely on the school library channel.

We need to get over 23,500 signatures by the end of the month . . . we can do it, together!

(At the time I wrote this post we were at 1073. Friends, we can exceed this goal!)

From Seanean:

President Barack Obama and his Administration have created a site to assist citizens in writing and signing petitions online that can, if all thresholds are met, make it to the President’s desk. This is how the recent changes in student loans came about. I have created a petition regarding school libraries, which I and my fellow CSLA and LASLA members hope might make it past the major thresholds, but we are having problems getting it far.

Would you be willing to help promote this petition to get ALL school libraries open with proper staffing and enough books to really help our children grow and become better readers, learners, and evaluators of information? California is woefully underfunded in this and some estimates take us now to 6,000 students or more for every one qualified school librarian. We need help. We need hope. Can you help us?

The ALA Washington Office is asking everyone to tweet this on Monday, the 7th, at 11 A.M. Eastern time, prior to the Tuesday, November 8th Senate hearing on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). School libraries are not part of it. A school libraries amendment was withdrawn from ESEA when it was marked up by the Senate HELP committee on October 20th.

Help remedy this slight to learners. On 11AM Eastern on Monday, please tweet:

Alice Yucht suggests that we go a step further customize our tweets and include our Senators’ @signs in our Tweets. I suggest–if your senator’s name is short–that we also add #tlchat to those tweets so we can see for ourselves the power of our tribe!